New York University
The Edgar M. Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life
7 EAST 10TH STREET
NEW YORK CITY

ARTIST ELLEN FRANK WILL APPEAR WITH EVERETT FOX, Hebrew Scholar, to lecture on their creation of a contemporary illuminated manuscript Hanukkah Illuminated and on Ms. Frank’s gold leaf illuminated art, developed through her educational arts foundation EFIA Foundation, Inc.

Frank and Fox will give "back and forth" dramatic readings using Frank’s projected illuminated paintings and Fox’s texts from Ms. Frank’s Hanukkah Illuminated: A Book of Days. Fox will focus on significant transformations of Jewish holidays, and on how Hanukkah Illuminated can contribute to a startling revival as holiday and art move from darkness to light, from war to peace.

Frank's large illuminated painting, Jerusalem: A Painting Toward Peace, from her series Cities of Peace will be on display during the lecture.

ELLEN FRANK’s careers as painter, writer, and scholar are interwoven into her beautifully illuminated paintings. Her many awards in painting, book design and scholarship include a Fulbright Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts, Ford Foundation grant, Pollack Krasner Award in Painting, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Ms. Frank’s book Literary Architecture was voted “Best Book in 50 Years” by the University of California Press. For the past decade Ms. Frank has been creating and exhibiting her illuminated manuscripts, murals and scrolls that incorporate 22-karat gold leaf and other precious metals. She is currently working on Hanukkah Illuminated: A Book of Days, The Illuminated King Arthur, and Cities of Peace. In 2004 she founded The Ellen Frank Illumination Arts Foundations, Inc., dedicated to elevating the human spirit through arts production, training and education. Ms. Frank holds a doctoral degree in Literature and the Visual Arts from Stanford University.

EVERETT FOX is Allen M. Glick Professor of Judaic and Biblical Studies and Director of the Program in Jewish Studies at Clark University. Professor Fox is the translator of The Five Books of Moses (with commentary and notes), which was published by Schocken Books in 1995, and Give Us a King! A New Translation of the Book of Samuel, which appeared in 1999. He co-edited Scripture and Translation (Indiana University Press, 1994), a collection of essays by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, with Prof. Lawrence Rosenwald of Wellesley College. The next volume of his Bible translation, The Early Prophets, will appear next year.

“The amazed delight this project is bound to elicit ensures that Hanukkah Illuminated will last as long as the best examples of any great civilization can endure.”

Marshall Yaeger, Anchor International Foundation

“Frank’s work is emphatically contemporary; it pits the ephemerality of life against the still moment of art while affirming the value of both.”

The Los Angeles Times